Friday, January 20, 2006

One beer and then everything smells like cigarette smoke.

I despise the trade-off. My classmates and I have a hard day in class this week so we decided to have some beers after class. In exchange for some good socialization and griping about the hard day, we end up reeking of cigarette smoke for the rest of the evening and most of the next day. I just woke up from a night out with friends and even my backpack (!!!) smells bad. I will never get over this.

While in search of some late night eats last night, my friends and I met a young English-speaking Italian couple. The woman was carrying a Timbuk2 bag (for those of you who know how much I love my pink/black Timbuk2 bag) so we all started chatting and it ends up that the woman works at the Stanford Linear Accelerator every once in awhile and knows Los Gatos. My smile increased ten-fold when she tells me this.

So my prof corrects me in stating that France has at least 365 cheeses. Not sure if 400 is correct or not. I guess they have this saying that goes: Il ya autant de sortes de fromage que de jours dans l'annee (There are as many types of cheese as there are days in the year.)

For my friend that asked me to talk more about the food...Darin and I eat at home a lot and the things we like to buy at Carrefour (our supermarche) is: crackers that look like mini toasted baguette slices, soy yogurt in every flavor imaginable including chocolate, this rich dark chocolate pudding, honeyed chestnuts that come in a jar (very tasty), hummus that has fromage in it (!!!), we like to make salads with tomatoes and poivrons (bell peppers) and sometimes bits of smoked salmon, cheeses of different varieties, this salmon spread that contains fish eggs (it sounds disgusting, but it is also very delicious and addicting), pastas with a really good bottled pasta sauce, dried fruit, etc. Bubbly water is very popular in our apartment too.

Yesterday, my classmates and I ate in an Italian restaurant that served homemade pasta. It was delicious! I ate off of everyone's plate. Darin and I recently dined at a French restaurant that was also delicious. I had a vegetable soup with chunks of cheese in it. Darin had an endive salad...I think. My main meal was this Lyonnaise specialty that will be hard to describe, but it was like a piece of cooked dough the size of my hand and it was placed on top of a tasty sauce. Darin had some type of fish. For dessert, I had a big meringue ball on top of a vanilla sauce and Darin had a fruit salad (booooooring).

I saw the movie, "Mrs. Henderson", last night. It was in VO (original version), but it had French subtitles which I tended to glance at a lot. What a great way to learn the language! Too bad I can't rent "Beverly Hills 90210" in VO and with French subtitles. I would be fluent in no time after watching 10 seasons of that delightful and truly missed show. I'm not ready to step foot in the other theater that shows all the blockbuster movies...they're all dubbed in French. Boo hoo.

Darin and I made a substantial newlywed purchase the other day: a washing machine. What's a girl in France supposed to do now?

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